Nazi-Looted Art’s Jewish Owners Sought by France

A French Senate report calls for the government to make the archives on looted art at the foreign ministry and the Louvre museum more accessible, including the scanning of thousands of relevant documents still sitting in cartons. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- France is starting a search for the
Jewish owners of about 2,000 pieces of Nazi-plundered art, from
Monets and Rubens to Renoirs, that hang in museums such as the
Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

Almost 70 years after World War II, France is making one of
its biggest efforts to trace the Jewish owners of artworks
stolen by the Nazis, recovered by the Allies and sent to the
country after the war. President Francois Hollande’s government
is setting up a group of historians, regulators, archivists and
curators to actively track down families, instead of waiting for
claimants to come forward. The group starts working in March.

“It may be one of our last chances to find the owners,”
said Jean-Pierre Bady, a former director at the culture ministry,
who’s a member of a 1999-created Commission for the Compensation
of Spoliation Victims and who was instrumental in the formation
of the group. “Seventy years is a long time, but it’s never too
late to make things right.”

The Nazis seized hundreds of thousands of works of art from
Jewish private collections between 1933 and 1945 as part of
their policy of racial persecution in what has been seen as the
biggest such heist in history. Much of the art was returned to
national governments, with unclaimed pieces landing in museums.

In France, the Hollande government’s plan would mark the
first effort to reach out to victims of the Nazis since 1995
when former President Jacques Chirac for the first time
recognized France’s responsibility for collaborating in anti-Semitic persecutions during the country’s occupation by the
Germans, acknowledging the deportation of Jewish people.

Senate Report

The new push follows a French Senate report last month that
called on the government to be more proactive and transparent.

The report also calls for the government to make the
archives on looted art at the foreign ministry and the Louvre
museum more accessible, including the scanning of thousands of
relevant documents still sitting in cartons.

Corinne Bouchoux, a Green Party senator and the author of
the report, said museums should also provide more information on
the origin of art they’ve added since the war.

Recent research by an art historian showed three paintings
at the modern art museum Centre Pompidou in Paris came from a
looted collection and were marked as being “anonymous gifts.”
They’ve since been re-classified.

Following the Chirac speech, France set up a group in 1997
called the Matteoli Mission, which created the Commission for
the Compensation of Spoliation Victims for all sorts of
casualties of Nazi excesses. The mission searched for owners of
looted goods for about two years.

Latest Return

“It was too short but it was a start, especially after
decades of nearly no work,” Muriel de Bastier, the art
historian member of the Commission.

Restitutions have not halted in the past decades. Victims
or their relatives have contacted the Commission or France’s
museums to recover their paintings.

The culture ministry will soon be returning seven paintings
looted by the Nazis from two Jewish families.

Bruno Saunier, who heads the art collections at the
National Museums’ Agency said on Feb. 14 that it was “the
largest number of paintings returned to Jewish families in over
a decade.” He said the state returns about one painting on
average every year.

The artworks by painters including by Alessandro Longhi,
Gaspare Diziani and Pieter Jansz van Asch were to have been
displayed in the private museum Adolf Hitler had planned with
looted art from great European collections. The two families had
been demanding their restitution for several years.

Special List

The paintings are part of the 2,000 artworks that France
wants to return to victims. The Pieter van Asch painting once
belonged to Josef Wiener, a banker from the former
Czechoslovakia.

The six Italian art pieces were from Richard Neumann’s
collection in Vienna. With Nazi troops advancing, Neumann moved
with his art collection and family to France. He sold much of
his art at fire-sale prices to be able to leave France,
demanding aid from the French government after the war to get
them back. He failed. His octogenarian grandson, Thomas
Selldorff, took over the effort in 2001.

The list will be the priority of Hollande’s new group
searching for descendants of victims.

Central Europe

“We believe that most of the major works that we will seek
to return belong to families from Central and Eastern Europe,
like Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Austria or Hungary,”
Saunier said in an interview.

The Nazis looted art across occupied Europe as well as from
Germany. The Allies assembled the plundered objects they found
at the end of World War II at central collecting points in
Germany, and sent artworks whose owners couldn’t immediately be
found to the national government of their origin. It was up to
governments to trace the owners of the works and return them.

Four years after the end of the war, the French government
had returned three-quarters of the 61,233 art pieces that had
been sent to the country. Of the remaining 15,792 pieces whose
owners hadn’t been tracked down, about 13,500 with little art
value were auctioned off while about 2,000 have exhibited in
France’s 57 museums since the 1950s.

After 1954, the search for the rightful owners of the art
came to a near standstill with only 79 restitutions between then
and 1999. The Commission has since 1999 returned nine artworks
and handed out 33 million euros ($44 million) in compensation
for lost pieces. Its compensation is based on the estimated
value of the paintings during the war.